Practical Magic 2 First Reactions: Critics Are Split, But Everyone Agrees on Bullock and Kidman

The embargo on early reactions to Practical Magic 2 has lifted, and the first wave of critic and press responses is doing what first waves of reactions to legacy sequels tend to do: splitting down the middle. Some critics are calling it a cozy, nostalgic return to the Owens family. Others are calling it bloated, overstuffed, and short on the actual magic. What almost nobody disagrees on is that Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, reprising their roles as sisters Sally and Gillian Owens nearly thirty years after the original, are the reason to show up.

Here's what the reactions actually say, where the sourcing gets murky, and what's still genuinely unresolved about basic facts like when the movie comes out and how long it actually runs.

Two Release Dates, One Movie

Start with something that should be simple and isn't. Rotten Tomatoes lists Practical Magic 2's release date as September 10, 2026. Comic Book Movie's roundup, along with an earlier Box Office Pro report, lists it as September 11, 2026. That's a one-day discrepancy that doesn't appear to have been reconciled across outlets as of this writing, and it's worth flagging rather than quietly picking one and presenting it as settled. A TMDB listing for the film adds a third data point, showing a release date of September 9, 2026 — which only underscores how unsettled the film's actual release-date reporting is this close to launch. Discrepancies like this usually shake out to be the difference between a limited early release, an official wide date, and a database placeholder that hasn't been updated, but nothing sourced here explains which is which. Treat any specific date you see attached to this film with a little skepticism until the studio nails it down publicly.

A Runtime That Doesn't Match Itself

The second discrepancy is stranger, because it isn't between two different outlets — it's between Rotten Tomatoes and the actual critics writing for that same wave of coverage. Rotten Tomatoes' own listing for Practical Magic 2 puts the runtime at 1 hour 50 minutes (110 minutes) and rates it PG-13. But multiple critics who saw the film — Simon Thompson, Courtney Howard, and the Comic Book Movie roundup among them — independently describe it as running around 130 minutes, and multiple reactions specifically call it out for feeling overlong. That's a 20-minute gap between what the distributor's own listing says and what people who sat through the film are reporting, and it's not a small rounding error. It's possible the 110-minute figure reflects an earlier cut, a theatrical-minus-credits runtime, or simply an error in RT's listing that hasn't been corrected yet. Whatever the explanation, it's an unresolved discrepancy, not a case where one number is obviously right and the other is a typo, and several of the negative reactions below hinge directly on the film feeling too long — which lines up much more closely with the 130-minute figure critics are reporting than with RT's own listed runtime.

The Cast and the Setup

Susanne Bier directs the sequel, stepping into a franchise that's been dormant since the 1998 original. Bullock and Kidman return as Sally and Gillian Owens, joined by Joey King as Sally's daughter Kylie and Maisie Williams as Antonia, plus Stockard Channing and Dianne Wiest returning as Aunt Frances and Aunt Jet. Lee Pace, Xolo Maridueña, and Solly McLeod round out the cast, according to Comic Book Movie and Rotten Tomatoes' listings for the film.

The studio-provided plot summary, per Rotten Tomatoes, returns to "a world steeped in moonlit mischief and powerful ancestral magic," with the Owens sisters confronting "the dark curse that threatens to unravel their family once and for all." That's intentionally vague marketing language, and nothing in the sourcing here gets more specific about what that curse actually is or how it plays out — which is fine, since none of the early reactions describe it as a spoiler-heavy film so much as a chemistry-driven one.

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The Negative Case

The harshest reaction in the roundup comes from Simon Thompson, who called Practical Magic 2 a "disappointingly tepid sequel that fails to conjure up much of anything — including the original's whimsy." Thompson specifically dinged the pacing as off and described the third act as "fumbled," which is a fairly direct hit against a film whose entire premise depends on sticking the landing on that dark-curse resolution.

Marc Zammit was blunter still, calling the film "terrible" and complaining that "there were literally 5 different stories happening in the film! Barely any magic at all!" That's a specific, structural complaint — not just "it's not good," but a diagnosis of why: a script trying to service too many characters and subplots at once, at the expense of the thing the title is supposed to be about.

Courtney Howard landed somewhere similar, saying the film is "30 minutes too long" and pointing to excessive exposition, underdeveloped dynamics between Sally and her daughter, and a soundtrack she found lacking. Notably, Howard still carved out space to say Bullock and Kidman's chemistry "carries the film" — a pattern that shows up across almost every negative reaction in this roundup, and one worth paying attention to.

ComingSoon's Jonathan Sim wrote that the film "won't leave you bewitched," citing a predictable plot, weak humor, and thin supporting performances. Like Howard, he still called the Bullock-Kidman sister dynamic "the best" part of the film. Jeff Ewing summed it up as a "mixed bag" — the leads excel, in his view, but the film runs too long and mishandles the daughter characters, echoing Howard's specific complaint almost exactly.

The Positive Case

Not every early reaction lands in the same place. Tom Chatalbash praised the film as "delightfully cozy and charming," with a "hefty amount of heart" that he framed as a reward specifically for longtime fans of the original — the kind of review that reads as most persuasive to people who already have an emotional stake in these characters, rather than newcomers evaluating the film cold.

Lauren Bradshaw went further, saying she "absolutely LOVED" the film and praising its chemistry and its focus on sisterhood. Zosia Wijaszka called it "nostalgic & touching," though even she flagged a slightly excessive runtime as a soft spot, and noted the film's focus skews uneven in favor of Joey King's arc over the ensemble as a whole. That's worth sitting with, because it means even the most positive reactions in this roundup aren't unqualified raves — they're warm reactions with an asterisk, which is a meaningfully different thing than a consensus rave.

What Both Camps Actually Agree On

Strip out the specific praise and complaints, and a pattern emerges that both Yahoo/ComingSoon's roundup and Comic Book Movie's roundup independently point to: overall reception is trending negative on pacing and plot, while trending positive on the Bullock-Kidman chemistry specifically. That's a genuinely useful signal, because it's not just one critic's opinion — it's the throughline across writers who otherwise land on opposite sides of a thumbs-up-or-down verdict.

It's also worth being upfront about the sourcing here. The Yahoo/ComingSoon piece and the Comic Book Movie piece both appear to be drawing from the same underlying wave of social-media and press-screening reactions — the same names (Thompson, Howard, Zammit, Sim) show up in both roundups. That means this should be read as one reaction wave reported through two outlets, not as two fully independent confirmations of the same split. It's still a real and consistent pattern, but it's one data point amplified twice rather than two separate data points that happened to agree.

Rotten Tomatoes' own aggregate critic score for the film had not populated as of this writing — zero reviews logged on the Tomatometer at the time of this research. Nothing here should be read as implying what that eventual score will be. Early social reactions and an official Tomatometer percentage are different things, and the gap between "critics who saw an early screening tweeted about it" and "critics filed full reviews that get aggregated into a score" can be significant, both in tone and in number.

The Box Office Question

One more number worth flagging clearly as a projection rather than a fact: Comic Book Movie's roundup cites industry expectations of a $35 million to $45 million domestic opening for Practical Magic 2. That's a pre-release estimate, not an actual result, and it's the kind of figure that tends to move around in either direction once actual tracking numbers firm up closer to release. For context, the original 1998 Practical Magic was a modest box office performer that found its real audience later, through cable reruns and home video, and became something closer to a cult classic than a theatrical blockbuster in its own moment. A nearly thirty-year gap between films, especially one built around a specific kind of autumn-witchy nostalgia, makes this opening estimate genuinely hard to forecast with confidence — the film could easily open stronger or softer than the range being floated.

Where This Leaves the Film

Taken together, the picture that emerges from this first wave of reactions is a sequel that's clearly betting everything on Bullock and Kidman, and mostly winning that bet, while struggling with the more basic mechanics of plotting a two-hour-plus ensemble film around a central curse mystery. That's not an unusual place for a legacy sequel to land — long-gap follow-ups to beloved originals tend to succeed or fail based on whether the returning stars still have the chemistry that made the original work, and by that measure, nearly every critic quoted here, positive or negative, agrees the answer is yes. Whether that's enough to carry a film that multiple critics are independently describing as overlong and structurally overcrowded is the actual open question heading into release — one that a fuller critical consensus, once Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer actually populates, should start to answer more concretely than any single early reaction can.